The government is cutting the number of its ICT frameworks from 26 down to just 10 - a move that has been criticised for leaving SMEs in the dark.
The strategy will initially reduce the number of frameworks down to 16, but as more agreements expire that number will decrease to 10. The new frameworks will typically last for …

Open-source programming frameworks revolutionised Java development during the last decade, but not enough people know how to use them properly.
That’s according to the CRASH Special Report by CAST that sampled 496 applications with 152 million lines of code and found most apps had been misconfigured. This increased the degree of …

Professional buying group Government Procurement Services is in a race to roll out a bunch of tenders for multi-billion pound hardware and software frameworks before public sector year-end.
According to sources familiar with the matter, GPS will issue a replacement to the pan-public sector Commodity IT Hardware & Software (CITHS …

Following an internal review of government IT procurement, the Cabinet Office has announced that it has scrapped plans to use some existing ICT frameworks.
It has said that government departments will only be able to establish framework agreements in future if they can show it will "explicitly deliver against key strategic needs …

The G-Cloud team says that in a move away from traditional frameworks, it is setting up "multiple overlapping frameworks" which it says are each compliant with the Official Journal of the European Union process.
A blog post on the G-Cloud website explains that bidding for G-Cloud contracts can become "unusual" – and that once …

Government Procurement Services (GPS) has defended the matrix of monolithic public sector IT purchasing frameworks, claiming purse-holders will figure out where to spend taxpayers' cash.
It emerged this week that the forthcoming £4bn IT Hardware & Services framework, due to go live on 1 June, will run in parallel with two other …

UK.gov today opened its long-awaited Digital Marketplace for public sector procurement, which will bring the “confusing” number of frameworks under one roof.
As yet the Marketplace is looking rather lonely, with the G-Cloud the only framework on the platform. The next version of the Digital Services framework for “agile” digital …

The Hewlett Foundation has found US$45m in its other jacket, and has anointed three lucky US universities to spend on security research.
MIT, Stanford and UC Berkeley will share the simoleons, in a program MIT says is designed to generate a “robust marketplace of ideas”, whatever that is. On a more pragmatic basis, the …

Any in-memory-focussed clustered system has to deal with failure at some point, and learn how to recover from, or tolerate, it.
Replication is a common method but it slows down processing, especially in sequences of jobs in a pipeline. However, upstart Tachyon Nexus thinks it has found a way round that problem, and can go a …

Analysis
When Microsoft came up with Windows 8 a couple of years ago, the message was clear: the future is tablet-shaped. The Windows desktop is still there, but not much changed from Windows 7 - some things went backwards, such as translucent “Aero” windows, available in 7 but gone in 8. Now the company is scrambling to fix its desktop …

Ubuntu 15.04 is here – almost. The first beta of Vivid Vervet has been delivered, and with it have come images of the penguin flock that nestles on this OS.
I looked at Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME and Ubuntu MATE but there’s also Lubuntu and the China-centric Ubuntu Kylin, which I didn’t test.
These are beta releases and …

The Docker project has been re-organised following last year’s rapid success, with the names of folk filling the positions of chief architect, chief maintainer and chief operator being announced on Wednesday.
Those people are Docker founder Solomon Hykes, maintainer Michael Crosby and project newbie Steve Francia, who served as …

Video
Youtube Video
Mobile Ready and responsive development are the must know skills for anyone involved with web development, Juggling the HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript is a challenging ask but Foundation is here to help! A rapid prototyping and industrial scalable framework it makes responsive design a simpler and more straightforward …

Former G-Cloud head Chris Chant has entered the growing row over the status of the framework under the UK's Government Digital Service (GDS), criticising its decision to ditch a brand "that has won hearts and minds".
Last week, the GDS moved the @G_Cloud_UK Twitter handle to the Digital Marketplace platform @GOVUKdigimkt, in …

UK regulator Ofcom has announced a wide-ranging review of digital communications, looking at infrastructure and competition.
The review will examine incentives for efficient investment and effective competition drive good outcomes: coverage, choice, price and quality of service for consumers, citizens and businesses.
It will …

Structure 2010
VMware is committed to buying more software companies specializing in frameworks to provide application portability – and to keep up with coders.
On Wednesday, company chief executive and president Paul Maritz promised "you will see us expand our repertoire over the next few quarters."
Speaking at the Structure 2010 conference …

Capita gobbled up a larger piece of the UK's £800m education IT spending market in 2013, with sales up 9 per cent to £234m.
According to analyst firm TechMarketView, the top 10 suppliers dominated the education IT market with combined revenues of £741m.
Capita’s sales were bolstered by the acquisition of Northgate Managed …

Pic
Researchers have found a way to make tiny 3D structures out of silicon that "pop up" into shape when glued to an elastic substrate, paving the way to new forms of electronics.
The minute shapes mimic complex mechanisms in biology – such as the internal structure of teeth and networks of veins and brain cells – and could be used …

BMC Software has dipped into Cisco for its new techie head, with the once-public systems management specialist nabbing Phil Harris as its chief technology officer.
Harris has already updated his LinkedIn profile to announce the change, and replaces BMC veteran Kia Behnia, who’d been CTO since 2006 and was on sabbatical.
Harris …

Central government is breaking its own commitment to increase procurement from SMEs by squeezing small businesses out of its existing frameworks for "digital services."
A number of small businesses have complained that the set-up of the latest version of the Digital Services framework amounts to a recruitment "body-shopping" …

A £100m pot of cash for managed service providers will form part of the Scottish government's next public sector-wide tech agreement.
A prior information notice on the Official Journal of the EU was distributed to suppliers for the replacement to the Scottish Procurement Framework, which is currently winding down.
"Scottish …

We know that data centres operate with a high proportion of abstraction technologies. This should come as no surprise – the cloud services they house are in and of themselves physically “abstracted” (or, perhaps, even “conceptualised”) chunks of computing and storage power.
We also know that Docker, as an open-source application …

Yahoo! has announced that its Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) project is redundant in the age of node.js and better browsers.
The library has been a project in the Purple Palace since 2005, the web giant says, and has been out in public since 2006. While some of its techniques – its modules and dynamic loading, for example – escaped …

Linux-served porn sites may offer devs more than they bargained for after villains behind one of 2014's nastiest malware campaigns changed tactics to hit adult sites with stealthier wares.
The Windigo campaign was revealed in March 2014 to have over the previous two years infected 25,000 Unix and Linux servers, with some 10,000 …

Lab
Our research in the field of operational IT management has yielded much in the way of rich, down to earth insights into day to day realities, thanks to the readers of El Reg. As part of this ongoing exploration, we’ve had the opportunity to dig around a bit on the topic of best practice frameworks.
What we found would not …

Canonical's "snappy" new formulation of Ubuntu has gained the support of another major public cloud vendor, with Google making the lightweight Linux available for customers of its Compute Engine IaaS offering.
Announced earlier this month, Ubuntu Core is a stripped-down version of the OS designed specifically for large-scale …

A pressure group backed by some of the largest internet companies has urged the US Senate to pass the USA FREEDOM Act, which would curb some forms of online spying by the government.
Reform Government Surveillance (RGS) voiced its support for the proposed law in an open letter published to it Tumblr site on Sunday, which was …

Java developers were warned, but they didn't listen. Security researchers at Trend Micro report that old and vulnerable versions of the Apache Struts framework for Java are still in widespread use, and now Chinese hackers are using automated tools to exploit their flaws.
The vulnerabilities in question were patched in the July …

Open sorcery evangelist Red Hat has updated its Gluster clustering Red Hat Storage Server to v3, adding capacity and cluster nodes.
RHSS v 3.0 is based on the GlusterFS 3.6 file system with RHEL 6.0. It is designed for scale-out file storage and is built from, of course, open source software.
A datasheet (PDF) says: “Red Hat …

The Cabinet Office has insisted the multi-billion pound software and hardware framework that is about to surface will complement and not overshadow its cloud-first policy.
At the end of October, some £63.4m had been transacted on CloudStore since its launch in March 2012. The web catalogue lists accredited public sector …

Internet of Stuff gadgets need to have security with a 10-year lifespan if they are to offer any kind of decent protection to people and national infrastructures, according to a new report.
Beancounters at Beecham Research have been the latest to warn that the much-vaunted Internet of Things is going to run into security issues …

Microsoft has revealed more details about .NET Core, "the foundation for all future .NET platforms".
In a detailed post, Microsoft’s program manager Immo Landwerth explains why the company is forking .NET in order to make sense of shipping .NET for multiple platforms, including Windows desktop, Windows Store (or “Metro”), …

Google’s Miško Hevery, co-inventor of the popular AngularJS framework, has announced a new project to improve JavaScript by adding type annotations and other features.
Miško Hevery presents AtScript Miško Hevery presents AtScript at ngEurope
The announcement came at the ng-europe Angular conference in Paris at the end of …

The Cabinet Office has confirmed the line-up of suppliers for the latest pan-public sector mega framework, but is unable to provide a start date nearly a year after the contract notice was first published.
“We are pleased to announce that the Technology Products agreement has been awarded. We will share further information on …

Big data projects – seen by some as the tech industry’s latest snake oil and others as a potentially valuable tool to dig up fresh information – is being held back by the lack of data scientists for hire.
This is according to Ron Raffensperger, Huawei’s chief techie for the IT product line that sits within its Data Centre …

In a sudden about turn, analysts at Forrester Research have decided AJAX technology is not the best solution to rich Internet applications after all.
In a report, Forrester has recommended businesses should resort to vendor-specific platforms such as Adobe Systems' AIR and Microsoft's Silverlight because AJAX can't deliver the …

Fujitsu’s CTO slapped down the net neutrality dogmatists yesterday, saying the flood of data due to the emergence of the internet of things meant society would force a new pricing model.
Joseph Reger, Fujitsu cto, with his 3D-printed doppelganger Joseph Reger, Fujitsu CTO, with his 3D-printed replica
Joseph Reger told a crowd …

Review
Plasma 5, released last week, is a major redesign of the Unix KDE desktop environment and underlying frameworks.
Perhaps the most notable difference is the visual changes, which see KDE embracing a more streamlined, "flat" interface, but it's also the first version of KDE to be powered by Qt 5 and the recently released KDE …

Enterprise-class PostgreSQL database vendor EnterpriseDB has launched a free turnkey development environment designed to make it easier for coders to build web applications using PostgreSQL's new NoSQL capabilities.
The open source PostgreSQL project has been adding NoSQL-like features for the past couple of versions, most …

Google has released version 1.0 of Android Studio, now the official IDE for Android.
The development tool has been in preview since its announcement at the Google I/O conference in May 2013, and in beta since June this year. There are a variety of Android development tools available, but until now the official bundle has been …

MWC 2015
Microsoft's Windows 10 Universal App Platform has been explained in detail for the first time, at a developer event in Barcelona as part of Mobile World Congress.
The project is "the culmination of our platform convergence journey with Windows", according to Microsoft's Kevin Gallo, who gave the keynote at the event.
The term “ …

Microsoft will retire the visual design tool for its Entity Framework (EF) database tool in the upcoming version 7, in favour of a text-based “code first” approach.
Entity Framework is an object-relational mapping (ORM) tool. It lets developers work at a higher level of abstraction, coding with application objects rather than …

The International Telecommunications Union has communed with the auto industry and agreed “to host a dialogue of senior executives of vehicle manufacturers to identify the activities needed to consider future steps to realize the potential of fully autonomous driving.”
That statement, part of a communiqué issued in the wake of …

The Crown Representative for SMEs is talking big about working with small tech suppliers, but even he can't detail in a transparent way the exact financial benefits of doing so.
SME flag-waver Stephen Allott blogged that at the end of October, 20 months since launch, 56 per cent of the £63.46m transacted on CloudStore, a web …

The Home Office gave Dell just a fortnight to custom build 16,000 PCs but an admin cockup led to the order being shelved, and it is not clear if it will be re-tendered.
A mini-auction took place in the first week of March with a build and delivery date set for the end of the month. Most of the tier ones competed on the deal but …

Google's Bouncer Android defence tool is one of a dozen malware detection platforms that can be flawlessly skirted by malware employing smarter heuristics, researchers have found.
Malware kitted out with virtual machine detection functions and clever heuristics could bypass seemingly any detection platform on the market. …

The government has enlisted the boss of an SME yet to win any business via G-Cloud to advise on ways to, er, oil the wheels of commerce for other small traders that have similarly found public sector contract success elusive.
Dragons' Den star Piers Linney, joint head at AIM-listed, cloudy infrastructure biz Outsourcery, is the …

VMware's NSX network virtualisation software has been added to the company's price list, a small-but-important milestone that sees the product available to resellers for the first time.
Virtzilla announced NSX last August and released it in October of the same year, but until now has only sold it direct to customers. VMware …

Review
As has become regrettably typical for the Fedora project, the first Fedora 21 beta is well behind schedule. According to the current schedule on the Fedora wiki, the final version will arrive about a month late, on 9 December. That is if nothing goes wrong during the beta testing phase that's just started.
A month might not …

A group of professional buyers for government have given hardware and software suppliers the heads-up on an overarching public sector procurement vehicle - and it estimates that to be worth up to £6bn.
Details of the IT Products, Associated Services and Solutions (IT PASS), were leaked to us last month, but suppliers were …